What is daywork in construction and when is it paid?
A method of valuing work by the recorded hours of labour and plant and the materials used, plus agreed percentage additions, used for changes that cannot fairly be measured and priced at rates. It is paid when the contract permits it and the daywork sheets were recorded and signed at the time.
Updated: 15 September 2026. By Jack Butler-Kettle, Quantity Surveyor & Claims Consultant.
The answer
Daywork is valuation by resources rather than by measure: the hours of labour, the hours of plant and the materials actually used on an item of work, each priced at the daywork rates in the contract or at cost, with percentage additions for overheads and profit. The standard forms allow it only as the last of the valuation methods, where a variation cannot properly be valued by measurement at contract or pro-rata rates, and they require the contractor to submit daywork sheets, usually within a set period of the work, for verification by the contract administrator or the payer's representative. The commercial consequences follow from that. A signed daywork sheet is a record of the resources used, not an agreement that the work will be paid as daywork; the payer can still argue it should have been measured. An unsigned sheet is a claim resting on the contractor's own word. And daywork submitted for work that could have been measured is usually assessed at measured value instead. The habit that protects the money is to raise the sheet the same day, get it signed the same day, and state on it why measurement was not possible.
Example
The situation
A contractor is instructed to trace and repair an unmarked live drain found during excavation, and the extent of the work cannot be known in advance, so the contract's daywork rates and percentages apply.
What happens
- The gang's hours, the excavator hours and the materials are recorded on a daywork sheet each day.
- Each sheet is signed by the site manager, with a note that the extent could not be known in advance.
- The item is valued at the contract's daywork rates and percentages at £4,300.
The outcome
The item stands at £4,300 on the signed sheets; had the sheets been produced a month later and unsigned, the payer would have measured the visible trench and paid for that.
The Daywork Sheet template records the resources in the form a payer can verify. --- Checks made on this draft: no RICS status or membership implied; no extension of time or delay analysis offered (time is named only to say it is separate); no fee figure; no invented clause numbers, case names or statistics; statutory references limited to sections 108, 111 and the general Construction Act mechanism; British English; dates in full; no em dashes; every example marked "Assume". Slugs for related questions are existing pages except where they refer to another draft in this file. Three questions from the audit were not drafted because they fall outside the voice brief: the two extension of time questions and the retention reform question.